On the Greens Victory

["Steve Painter and Rose McCann" <spainter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The fairly definite victory of Greens candidate Michael Organ in the seat of
Cunningham is a very significant development in Australian politics.
Cunningham is one of five seats nationally where a high concentration of
left-leaning tertiary educated people working in health, education, the
arts, etc, give the Greens a fairly large core primary vote, particularly in
conditions where the Labor leadership adopts a conservative stance on
matters such as treatment of refugees.

The 25 per cent vote achieved by the Greens is probably a little less than
the average Green vote that will be achieved in those five seats, because
the left-leaning trade union independent, teachers' union organiser Peter
Wilson, got another 10 per cent that would largely have gone to the Greens
if Wilson had not stood.

In these five seats Labor is very vulnerable to Australian lower-house
preferential voting system, because once the Greens get ahead of the Tories,
the Tories' lesser evil vote will elect the Green over Labor, which is what
happened in this situation.

The Greens got most of the preferences from the independent carrying the
Tory banner, David Moulds, who got about 9000 votes (13.6 per cent).

This is a pattern that is likely to be repeated in seats with a similar
social mix to Cunningham, where a high concentration of voters from what I
call the "new social layers" in some circumstances gives the Greens a vote
of 25 per cent and upwards.

In addition, this election victory will combine with the almost terminal
internal problems of the Australian Democrats to allow the Greens to leap
way ahead of the Democrats as the electoral home for radical,
tertiary-educated people.

Green politics has thrown up a number of parliamentary personalities or
aspirants who are extremely impressive in the broader electoral arena. These
personalities include Senator Bob Brown himself and state parliamentary
representatives in Brown's home state, Tasmania; Dee Margetts and the state
parliamentary representatives in WA; Pamela Curr, leader of the campaign for
clothing trade industry outworkers in Victoria, who is likely to stand
against Labor leading light Lindsay Tanner in the seat of Melbourne; Kerry
Nettle, the new Greens Senator from NSW; Ian Cohen and Lee Rhianon in the
NSW upper house, and the redoubtable Leichhardt Council Greens alderperson
Sylvia Hale, who is number-two on the Greens ticket for the NSW upper house
in the next NSW elections and will very probably be elected.

Having watched Michael Organ, the newly elected member for Cunningham, on
television, he seems to be a serious-minded, presentable, no-nonsense man of
the left.

I might note in this context that a couple of years ago when I became
involved in a public debate about historical revisionism in relation to
massacres of Aborigines, I had cause to do a kind of overview on published
literature on the question and to organise a kind of book list of material
on the subject as part of the argument against claims that there had been
few massacres.

One very useful piece of imaginative primary research that I discovered was
a monograph by Michael Organ on massacres of Aborigines in southern NSW,
published about 10 years ago by Wollongong University. A very useful
publication indeed.

The point of this is that Michael Organ is no new-chum to humane and
progressive interests and causes, and in an area with the social composition
of Cunningham he may well entrench himself as a powerful electoral fixture
who will be very difficult to shift, just as the National Party is finding
independent Peter Andren difficult to shift in rural NSW.

It's an electoral truism in Australian politics that by-elections often
produce freak results. For example, a by-election in Canberra a few years
ago resulted in a Liberal victory in a normally safe Labor seat, and Phil
Cleary's won the safe, heavily blue-collar, Labor electorate of Wills when
former prime minister Bob Hawke retired.

In both those instances the electorates returned to their normal Labor
allegiance in the subsequent general elections. No doubt the ALP leadership
is counting on such a development in Cunningham.

In my view, that may not happen in Cunningham, because Michael Organ's
election coincides with the dramatic "leftist" gentrification of the
northern suburbs of Wollongong. The Wollongong seat in the state parliament,
from the Wollongong CBD was held by the conservative independent Frank
Arkell, who held the state seat of Wollongong for several terms in the last
20 years.

The short-term impact of the Greens victory is very cautionary medicine for
Simon Crean, the Labor leader, who was unwise enough to unleash the
right-wing populist Latham on the electorate with a bizarre border
protection story in an electorate where the seascape looks outward to New
Zealand, across the Tasman Sea.

It's also a very salutary warning to Prime Minister John Howard in relation
to the desperate agitation of his government to turn popular anguish over
the Bali bombing into a groundswell of support for an imperialist assault on
Iraq.

Even the reactionary tabloids, such as the Sydney Telegraph, are hedging
their bets on this, because they're obviously aware of a bit of a strong
element of a fairly healthy Australian isolationism, even in the
conservative section of the population, regarding a military venture. There
is a sentiment that a military adventure, in which no clear, direct
Australian interests are involved, may increase the possibility that
Australia and Australians will be targets for terrorism, rather than
improving security for ordinary Australians.

Opponents of the war in the trade unions and the ALP now have a powerful
electoral indicator as to the possible unpopularity of this war, which they
should use to argue the case strongly against the war.

Nothing is likely to galvanise Labor politicians more against a military
adventure than the possibility that it may be electorally unpopular. Given
the basic contours of Australian society and trade union and electoral
politics, this victory for the Greens in Cunningham, in my view, underlines
the necessity for Marxists to adopt a united front strategy both towards the
Greens and towards the Labor Party-trade union continuum. Both are big
social and political realities in Australian society, which Marxists will
continue to confront for a fairly long foreseeable period.

For instance, in the short term, in the context of the absolutely necessary
agitation against Howard's war drive, the obvious demand to be placed mainly
on the Labor parliamentary caucus, must be that Labor, the Greens, the
Democrats and independents with a civilised hue should oppose it in the
lower house (where an interesting will be what some backbench Liberals might
do), and in the Senate where the war drive could possibly be defeated if the
lessons of Cunningham can be sufficiently driven home to the majority of the
Labor caucus.

If there was ever a time in Australian politics for an energetic prosecution
by Marxists of a strategic united front, towards both Labor and the Greens,
it's right now, in the wake of the Cunningham by-election.

Garry wrote:
>>BTW I hope someone passes this on to Bob Gould. Nothing refutes his
pro-Labor position more than the political reality that a defeat for Labor
is good, very good for the Left not to mention humanity.  The sad thing is
that in Cunningham Gould, one of the great figures of Australian Trotskyism,
would, if politically consistent, have been giving out how to vote cards for
Labor.>>

Bob gets the relevant posts from the list faxed to him a couple of times a
day.

The following letter, which Bob wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald last
week, has a description of the Cunningham electorate and election campaign.
The Bali bombing, shortly after the letter was sent, swamped all the
Australian newspapers, including the letters columns, and the letter wasn't
printed. It answers one or two of Garry's points and provides some
interesting background. No doubt Bob will have more to say later. - Steve
Painter

A View from the Left: Why Labor May Lose the Cunningham By-election

I'm an old Laborite. I've held a Labor Party ticket for nearly 50 years, and
I always work on the booth for Labor on election days. I hope Labor wins in
Cunningham for the traditional reasons. Nevertheless, all the polls suggest
Labor may lose, and it's worth asking why.

I've just finished a study of NSW electoral politics for the last 100 years,
a review article about the book, The People's Choice [available in full on
Ozleft http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Peopleschoice.html ], and
what emerges from NSW electoral history is a steady improvement of the
underlying Labor preferred vote over the 20th century because of a large
number of ongoing demographic changes that favour Labor. The underlying,
steady improvement of the Labor vote is demonstrated by the fact that Labor
governs all states and territories in Australia.

Nevertheless, my analysis also throws up a new phenomenon: some electorates
where a heavy concentration of urban, left-leaning tertiary educated people,
of the sort who work in education, the arts and the public service, where
the vote fluctuates between Labor and the Greens, and the Green vote
dramatically increases when Labor does uncivilised things like, in the last
elections, not standing up to the Liberal government over its barbaric
refugee policy.

The five electorates most at risk to the Greens are, in order of
vulnerability, Melbourne, held by Lindsay Tanner; Sydney, held by my friend
Tanya Plibersek; Cunningham and the two Canberra seats.

Cunningham is in this category because many tertiary-educated left-leaning
people who work in Sydney, live in the northern suburbs of Wollongong, the
Wollongong University is located there, and most tertiary-educated people
from the South Coast live there. In the recent mayoral elections in
Wollongong, so disastrous for Labor, the booths in the electorate of
Cunningham delivered a very high Green vote.

In my view, Bob Carr and the ALP head office showed a certain lack of
judgement in unleashing the bovver boy from Camden, the right-wind populist
of the NSW Right, Mark Latham, on Cunningham. The bizarre spectacle of
Latham standing like King Canute on a headland near a Wollongong beach,
gesticulating out to sea, babbling about "border protection", must have
bemused the left-leaning well-educated voters of Cunningham. Where does
Latham think the threat to Wollongong beaches comes from? New Zealand, New
Caledonia, Japan, Chile, the USA? Particularly in the Wollongong context,
"border protection" in a country with an enormous coastline, is a crazy
construction, used to justify a backward, chauvinist and barbaric policy
towards refugees.

The by-election is taking place in the context of the rapidly looming
Bush-Blair-Howard military assault on Iraq, which is so clearly a crude,
imperialist war for oil, with no possible advantage for ordinary
Australians. The long-time Labor federal MP, Laurie Brereton, a genuine
expert on foreign affairs, has come out unequivocally against this harsh and
unconscionable threat of war. In doing so, he shows better judgement than
many others in the federal parliamentary Labor Party. Given that polls
suggest a large majority of Australians oppose Bush's war (with probably an
even larger majority opposed in Cunningham), the ALP would have been smarter
to unleash Laurie Brereton on the electorate, rather than the irascible
Latham.

The way the Cunningham campaign has been handled, I fear that, when the
numbers go up on Saturday night, the preferences from the 11 other
candidates will pile up behind the Greens' Michael Organ, and he will win
the seat. If that happens, I hope that the ALP leadership will learn the
necessary lessons, and rapidly line up behind Brereton on the impending war,
and also ditch the inhuman refugee policy, and start to fight the Liberals
on the question of refugees.

Bob Gould


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